Eleventh Week

11th Week of Ordinary Time, Monday, Year II

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In today’s First Reading King Ahab’s desire to acquire some adjacent property to his palace seems innocuous enough, but for an Israelite land is birthright: a family’s property represents a portion of the Promised Land given by the Lord, and giving something up like that is not something to be done lightly. Ahab is thinking of expansion and landscaping, Naboth is thinking of birthright and his family’s inheritance. Ahab doesn’t understand and starts to pout instead of reflecting on how superficial, jaded, and selfish his offer was.

What follows through the machinations of his wife Jezebel shows an eclipse of justice in Samaria: Jezebel finds officials and personnel to falsely accuse and execute Naboth without outcries by anyone. Naboth, for defending his birthright, forfeits his life, and the rights to the land remit back to the king. The king himself should represent justice in his kingdom, but Ahab goes along with his wife’s plan without any qualms. Now the Lord must take justice into his own hands because the King, his anointed, does not. We’ll soon see the consequences of Ahab’s decision.

Let’s draw the lesson from this sad story of the importance of loving our neighbor as ourselves.

Readings: 1 Kings 21:1–16; Psalm 5:2–3b, 4b–7; Matthew 5:38–42. See also 11th Week in Ordinary Time, Monday.

11th Week of Ordinary Time, Sunday, Cycle C

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In today’s Gospel Jesus teaches us that there is a big difference between letting someone into your your home and letting them into your heart. To learn this lesson we must consider the outlook of Simon the Pharisee and his other invited guests. Pharisee literally meant “separated one.” The people admired the Pharisees because they observed many ritual and moral rules—hundreds—to be ritually and morally pure: prayers, ritual washings, dietary laws, a code of conduct, studies, etc.. That gave them a great prestige in Jewish society because separated meant untainted, uncorrupted. With this attitude it is likely that Simon invited Jesus seeing it as doing Jesus a favor. He was probably checking out this “prophet” whom everyone was talking about. If we measure the signs of hospitality that Jesus says Simon didn’t do—they weren’t required—it shows Jesus was a guest, but not a special guest in Simon’s eyes.

When the sinful woman arrived uninvited upon hearing Jesus was in town, for Simon it was a cut and dry case, from his perspective: prophets and sinners do not mix. Being righteous before God meant separating yourself from sinners, avoiding them, looking down on them. Sinners were contagious. Anyone righteous before God would spot that a mile away. Simon had heard a lot about this woman too: we don’t know what she did, but she must have been a notorious sinner if even the Pharisees had heard of her. If Simon was looking for proof to “flunk” Jesus on his test of being a prophet, this was it: “If this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him,that she is a sinner.” If Jesus didn’t know the woman, if he were a prophet, God would have told Him she was sinner and a source of ritual impurity at least, moral corruption at worst.

But Jesus read Simon’s heart, the hearts of the invited guests, the heart of the uninvited guest, and taught them that letting some into your home and letting them into your heart are two different things. The list of signs of hospitality Jesus told Simon about were not hospitality that was expected for a guest, but signs that showed how much the guest meant to the host. They were signs of esteem, appreciation, love. The sinful woman didn’t just try inviting Jesus over. Given her reputation, she probably thought he wouldn’t have accepted, being a righteous man. But it wasn’t just about fear of humiliation, or she wouldn’t have gone and walked into a house full of Pharisees who knew she was a sinner and probably would have beaten her and thrown her out. But she sought something the law by itself couldn’t give: forgiveness. St. Paul in the Second Reading today speaks of it as justification: becoming “just” before God, becoming righteous before God, is not about doing the works of the law alone: on their own they are worthless. It takes faith in Jesus to make us righteous before God.

Jesus didn’t deny that the woman had not only sinned, but committed “many” sins, so she went to him and showed that she appreciated what Jesus was giving her: forgiveness. Some have considered the Second Reading as a pretext for not worrying about being religiously observant, but what God is saying is that the “law”: the works you do, the code of conduct you follow, should be the way you show Jesus that you have let him into your heart, a way to show appreciation for not only creating you, but redeeming you. The Pharisees had forgotten about forgiveness, and God, in the Person of his Son, had to remind them that what God wanted was “mercy and not sacrifice.” They had used religious works for themselves, and to build up prestige, but also as a distance between them and God in their hearts. But forgiveness is shown by love. The more forgiveness, the more love. The Pharisees didn’t love much because they hadn’t been forgiven much. They were religious, they were observant of what they though God expected of them. And the ones who were hypocrites, whose hearts were far from God, showed hate for Jesus instead of love. All the way to Calvary. To see someone minister forgiveness on this earth was shocking to the Pharisees, which is why they murmured at Jesus’ words. God alone could forgive sins. If they had faith, they would have at least seen Jesus as the Messiah whom God sent to liberate people from their sins. And their faith would have grown to see Jesus was God, and resolved their difficulty. Jesus never stops inviting souls to come to His hearts not only to receive love and forgiveness, but to learn love a forgiveness as well.

Faith and love lead us to not only to go to where Jesus is, but to follow him. The Gospel tells us that the women who followed Jesus and the Twelve and supported them in their ministry had also let Jesus into their hearts in order to be healed. Their faith and love for Jesus grew, and was translated into good works. Love and forgiveness from Jesus becomes love and forgiveness for others. This is the best way to follow him. When we let Jesus into our hearts, not just into a corner of our house like maybe a salesman we’re trying to be polite to but hoping he’ll making his sales pitch and leave, we are transformed by his grace.

Ask Our Lord for the grace to see how much Simon is in you and how much of the follower who wants and shows forgiveness and love. Have you let Jesus into your heart completely or just a corner?

Readings: 2 Samuel 12:7–10, 13; Psalm 32:1–2, 5, 7, 11; Galatians 2:16, 19–21; Luke 7:36–8:3. See also 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Thursday and 3rd Week in Ordinary Time, Saturday.

11th Week in Ordinary Time, Saturday

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In today’s Gospel Our Lord directs our attention to the signs of God’s Providence in the present in order to not worry about the future. He could have provided for the oxygen we need to breathe by creating lots of molds and fungi, ugly green splotches, but instead he created magnificent trees, flowers and meadows that receive the sun and rain they need to grow and fulfill their purpose in the grand scheme of things in a beautiful way. Thinking about the future can be a source of anxiety and uncertainty if we lose sight of the signs around us every day of how God has created all things to be good and arranges them to help them achieve good ends and often in a beautiful way. He knows what we need before we even ask.

He has also traced out a path to goodness and beauty for our lives, but, unlike plants and animals, he has given us the gift of freedom and responsibility for our actions. We can work with him to help goodness and beauty grow and endure in a lasting way: not just the necessary needs of life that people sometimes worry about too much, but the sum of all noble dreams and aspirations in God’s loving and saving plan that he calls his Kingdom. Goodness and beauty for humanity are justice and love for all who choose to welcome them and strive for them in their lives.

Let’s not just ask Our Lord today for his Kingdom to come; let’s ask him to show us how we can help him to make it a reality.

Readings: 2 Corinthians 12:1–10; Psalm 34:8–13; Matthew 6:24–34.

11th Week in Ordinary Time, Friday

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In today’s Gospel Our Lord puts us on guard against treasuring things in our hearts that will not endure and will blind us to the bigger picture: the true worth of things, the ones we love, where we fit in the grand scheme of things, and the primacy of God. Golden ingots and junk bonds both pass away, just at different rates and with different risks, and the true treasure we should be striving for is Heaven, which is not only eternal life, but a life filled with joy at spending eternity with the real treasure: God and the ones we love. When our hearts and gaze are fixed on that, everything else is put into perspective: possessions, situations, and circumstances all become means of investing in a joyful eternal life for ourselves and for others. Living a life of virtue expands our horizon and keeps us focused on doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people out of love for God.

Our Lord puts us on guard today against the alternative to a desire for Heaven and for virtue. When someone is in the grips of vice, we describe them as blinded: blinded by pride, by greed, by ambition, by lust, by hatred, etc. That blinding process begins with a sort of vitiated myopia that fixes the heart on something secondary, blurring everything else in view, distorting our vision and blinding us to the bigger picture. People often in the grips of vice cannot see a way out of their situation: it seems impossible to them to change. The help and example of virtuous people is that ray of sunshine that they need to entertain the thought of a way out of their predicament and start bringing things again into proper focus. If vice narrows our view and our heart, virtue expands them again to all the rich possibilities of life from here to eternity.

Let’s thank Our Lord today for all the examples of virtue we’ve seen in our lives, and ask him to help us broaden our horizons again if we’re suffering from spiritual myopia.

Readings: 2 Corinthians 11:18, 21–30; Psalm 34:2–7; Matthew 6:19–23.

11th Week in Ordinary Time, Thursday

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In today’s Gospel Our Lord puts us on guard against turning our prayer into babble. Babble is a stream of words without any apparent meaning, but when we hear a child babble or a mentally handicapped person babbling we know that we may not understand what they are trying to communicate, but they are trying to communicate. Prayer can become babble because we recite the prayers that were handed along to us, but the words to us lose their meaning and we just recite them out of habit or obligation. Our Lord understands what we’re trying to say as long as we’re trying to communicate: words coming out of our mouths while our lips are on autopilot are borderline babble.

We can console ourselves at least by knowing that when we do pray Our Lord understands what we’re saying, even if we don’t, but that’s not enough. We have to make those words our words, and, if we can’t, we need to pray in our own words as well. Both types of prayer are important: the prayers we’ve received are the prayers of the Church, and we form her voice throughout the centuries. Those words didn’t form in a vacuum: every day in Mass the Church prays the Lord’s Prayer that we remember in today’s Gospel that the prayer Jesus himself taught us. Yet even as he was teaching it he felt the need to explain the last petition. It shouldn’t surprise us that we need the help of others to teach us the meaning of the prayers we say, just as the words of the Gospel would be meaningless to us if no one had translated them for us from their original Greek to a language we could understand.

We also need to be those “translators” into everyday life: by keeping the meaning of our prayers in our hearts, as part of our prayers, not just something somebody gave us to say out loud, we transmit their meaning to others as well. Let’s ask Our Lord today to help us reconnect to the meaning of the words we pray in order to “translate” them into something that others hungering for God can understand.

Readings: 2 Corinthians 11:1–11; Psalm 111:1b–4, 7–8; Matthew 6:7–15.